Will a garage ease Arboretum’s parking woes?

Dallas Arboretum attendance is at an all-time high, and the muchanticipated Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden hasn’t even opened.

To ease its parking woes, the Arboretum has proposed an overflow garage across the street on Garland Road with an underground walkway to access the gardens. Right now, the paved lot provides extra space for employees and volunteers.

“We have a critical need for parking,” says John Armstrong, the Arboretum’s vice president of property development. “This handles the occasional surge so there’s not a chance that parking could bleed into the neighborhoods.”

Although the plan meets zoning requirements for the area, neighbors are “cautiously suspicious” — in part because they haven’t forgotten last year’s Winfrey Point controversy, in which the Arboretum tried to use public parkland as a temporary overflow lot. Activists even uncovered plans to pave the area.

“The whole way the Winfrey Point issue was approached was horrifying,” says Kelly Cotten of Little Forest Hills. He’s not completely opposed to the garage, though.

“We’re not NIMBYs. We understand that it needs to go somewhere. We’d rather it go here than at the lake.”

However, neighbors are concerned about the missing-in-action, taxpayer-funded study that was supposed to answer important questions about Arboretum parking.

“We haven’t seen the report,” says Forest Hills resident Anita Childress, a lawyer who recently moved from Swiss Avenue. “We don’t know how private or public [this project] is.”

Last August, the city paid Desman Associates almost $80,000 worth of parks department funds to study whether the garage alone would meet the Arboretum’s need for the next 20 years. The original plan suggested funding the garage with city revenue bonds.

The Arboretum has since opted to seek a hefty private loan instead, deeming the Desman study irrelevant. Barbara Kindig, assistant director of the parks department, says nonetheless she will release the study in mid-July (it had not come out at press time, July 19) — even though it’s clear that the Arboretum will move forward with its plans regardless of what the report reveals.

“I purchased the study, and I’m going to get the study,” she says. “People seem to think it’s some kind of smoking gun. It’s not.”

The Arboretum unveiled early designs of the parking garage at a June meeting for three neighborhood associations: Forest Hills, Little Forest Hills and Emerald Isle. Backing up to a residential street, Angora, the garage includes two levels underground and four levels aboveground, with capacity for about 1,200 cars. The